Victimless leather, disembodied meat and pig wings
The University of Washington has a fascinating ongoing project, Tissue Culture & Art (TC&A), which blurs the line between the living and artificial by creating semi-living entities, perplexing vegetarians worldwide. First, they made Victimless Leather. Cultured in incubators from animal cell lines, nourished with antibiotics, the tissue was attached to a polymer matrix in the shape of a coat. The result is a leather coat that did not require the death of an animal, and as an aesthetic bonus, has no stiches, having been grown in one piece. Second, TC&A made Disembodied Cuisine, growing skeletal muscle over biopolymer as a potential food source. Though it does require an initial biopsy, while the semi-living meat is growing in a lab, the animal can heal. So, semi-living tissue may one day lead to meat for vegetarians and a significant decrease of animal suffering. Other TC&A projects include Pig Wings, which grew wing-shaped semi-living objects out of pig tissue, and Semi-Living Worry Dolls, traditionally used in Guatemala to ward off worries, these seven miniatures represented the TC&A’s worries: biotechnology, capitalism, demagogy, eugenics, fear itself, invisible genes, and the fear of hope.
These comments have been invaluable to me as is this whole site. I thank you for your comment.
Comment by Annerose — June 3, 2007 @ 10:53 am